Application of pseudo-cooling boundary conditions combined with electromagnetic and thermal weak coupling for the analysis of highly integrated aerospace actuators

Abstract

Two original numerical techniques are presented for the finite-element (FE) unsteady analysis of permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) and induction motors (IM) operating in demanding aerospace applications. The first technique is the electromagnetic and thermal analysis weak coupling using a multi-slice FE model. The advantage of this technique is the representation of complex actuator geometries including skewed magnets, by using a low computational cost 2-D model while taking into consideration temperature dependent material attributes. The second technique deals with the application of pseudo-cooling boundary conditions for the emulation of the cooling housing of actuators. Those boundary conditions are applied at the outer areas of the actuators in contact with the housing and eliminate the need of modeling complex 3-D geometries of highly integrated actuator housings.